Homegrown Cowboys

I've lived an international life since I left home for the first time to train my german in the small Austrian village of Badgastein. The village was mostly known for low-cost skiing and a lot of drunken Scandinavians - summer as well as winter time. I had a great time, being away from my then home country and exploring the secrets of the Alp region.

The desire to widen my horizons was born and since then I've always been attracted to international, diverse contexts and issues. Right now I'm up to my ears in learning more about corporate globalization.

The new interest for international markets among Silicon valley companies started about the same time as China came up as the talking subject at the water coolers. I'd say roughly end of 2003 / beginning of 2004. Before then working with international markets was great. I'll tell you why:

The area completely lacked homegrown cowboys since most of them where deemed useless and laid off during the Internet bust in 2000-2001. I transferred from one of our regional offices to headquarters in 2002, to give this what people felt 'doomed' corporate function a shot. My collegues in London thought it was a suicide mission and now many of them are here as well. I had a lot of ideas after I'd been working on the recieving end (didn't recieve that much) of head quarter's international operations. I got the great opportunity to start from scratch and together with the core teams architect something new that would actually serve our in-the-market folks.

The idea I had was that if we could leverage the core assets from a domestic level to a world wide level and then give everyone across the world access to these assets, we would really accelerate our growth. Then if we could aggregate key local knowledge and feed that into the core assets - to make them much smarter - we would make HQ much more insighful and innovative. It's based on a very simple concept: Let's work together, share what we know and need to win!

Not that revolutionary you would think. But why hadn't anyone done it before? I quickly came to the conclusion that there were two main reasons: lack of international experience and the corporate career bug (also known as the command-and-control virus and the MBA arrogance). Opening up the world to the valley geeks wasn't that hard. Many of them come from all around the world and have been working in international markets even if they lacked experience from international operations. But slowly introducing them to the challenges and the local insights increased their understanding and willingness to work on international projects. One down, one to go.

The second challenge was so much harder. Most people in corporations are not going beyond what they are told to do. The are playing the game, following the rules and will eventually win a promotion so they can move onto the next company and do the same. They will eventually get through the dreaded middle management concrete to be able to realize their ideas and raise their opinion. You just hope that they are not to sold out and old by that time. The willingness to change is usually driven by youth.

The conclusion of the above paragraph is that you do what you are incentiviced to do and if the hand is not fitting the glove there is no guilt. The reality of this corporate focus means that the bigger problems, the more long-term issues related to the company's global survival was increadible hard to push through. Did I mention that all this happened at grassroot level?

Anyhow - a lot of things has changed as time goes by and today working on international is the second coolest thing after being a killer innovator. That means that a lot of people without vision or any international experience has gravitated towards this area as the latest land grab opportunity. It's now overpopulated by sea-gull managers who talks about opportunity (for them), future growth (for them) and importance (of building empires). Why? Cause there is a strong personal incentive - getting on the career bullit train.

It's the perfect area for homegrown cowboys to make their next career bets. It's virtual, global and very unknown. You would think that to become a product manager you would need to know products, right. Transfer that to the international arena - to be a good international manager / architect you would need fundamental management skills PLUS international skills (languages, working experience, network understanding, travel experience et cetera). You would think that the 1992 bagpacking trip to Greece wouldn't really make the cut, right. Well, unfortunately it does - anything you have done outside of the US (gotten drunk in TJ, puked in Quartier Latin or just got robbed in Sao Paolo) counts in the corporate world of the confederacy of dunces.

Just in - the London bridge is for sale, again. It's a buy, cowboys! Yihah!